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SUSE and Microsoft renew the Novell deal

Microsoft and SUSE have renewed the interoperability deal which has existed between Microsoft and Novell for the last five years. That agreement saw collaboration between the two companies over Windows and Linux interoperation and support. The new accord sees the relationship extended four years through to 1 Jan 2016. The renewal of the deal confirms that the newly independent SUSE business unit of Attachmate will not be moving away from its controversial tie-up with Microsoft. The controversy around this centred around the intellectual property protection offered by Microsoft to SUSE's customers which some believe is GPL incompatible.

Microsoft has also committed to purchase an additional $100 million worth of SUSE Linux Enterprise certificates. The certificates are sold to Microsoft customers who wish to have their Linux systems supported by SUSE. According to the announcement, there are more than 725 customers, worldwide, making use of the certificate program. SUSE is also able to offer subscription support to Microsoft's customers for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and community distributions such as CentOS.

Microsoft and SUSE say they hope to focus in future on interoperability in the areas of could, virtualisation and manageability. One example given was a plan to work on a cross-platform solution for cloud systems based around Microsoft's Hyper-V cloud and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server to enable migration to private cloud architectures. Other co-operation will include integrating Microsoft System Center with SUSE Manager.